Strategy

Coming soon.

Theory of change

Coming soon.

Campaign

A campaign is like a long-term strategy but more detailed, conscious, and intensive; it requires active upkeep by a persistent activist group. As Ivan Marovic writes, "Unlike strategy, [campaigns] need to be detailed, their objectives specific, their targets well defined, and their messages clear and straightforward. Campaigns must correspond to changing environments but must also support the long-term strategy. And since it takes time for campaigns to have an effect… you must wait months before making changes based on an evaluation of the campaign’s effectiveness." Although tactics (like the thousands within Actipedia) can contribute to long-term and short-term change through their sheer existence, only campaigns bring about change with any reliability.

Taking it even further, George Lakey defines the nonviolent direct action campaign as an art form that includes not only strategy and tactics but also the organizational culture of the initiating/leading campaign group, which needs to be a "learning organization." In many situations the goal is not only the campaign’s own "win," but also stimulating a social movement and even a movement of movements for fundamental social transformation. (Thanks to ICNC.)

Target

An entity, usually a person, that can be pressured by a campaign (or a tactic therein) to effect the campaign's goal. Implied, of course, is that the entity actually has the power toeffect the goal, if pressured.

Goal

What a project or campaign is trying to achieve. Short-term goals tend to be things like: create or repeal a law; get a president impeached; make the city administration repair a sidewalk. For a short-term goal to have teeth, you need a clear theory of change, complete with targets that can be cajoled or pressured into effecting the goal. Long-term goals include: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.

Movement

Coming soon.

Prefigurative action

A tactic that embodies or represents an enviable future in the hopes that the mere sight of it will help bring about change. At best, it's connected to a campaign that gives witnesses a way of bringing about said change.

Making the invisible visible

The way in which a tactic can bring to light a little-known reality, often by embodying or otherwise representing it viscerally, often as part of a campaign to address it. One effective example of this is the diagram of the Brookes slave ship.

Emotion work

An effort to transform an affected community's response to conditions in order to bring about change. The term was used by Deborah Gould to describe how ACT-UP protests would transform the responses of passers-by—and, especially, participants—to the AIDS epidemic: from conciliation to rage, from requesting to demanding, from hopelessness to fierce determination.